YOU know how it is. People talk about you all the time; what you’re like, what you believe in, how you’re plotting to undermine values.  Maybe you tick one if the boxes, or maybe a few, or maybe they’re all baseless claims.

Sometimes you wonder how is it that these pundits, perfect strangers to you and your family, have so much insight into your deepest and darkest thoughts.

What makes things worse is when you don’t know when someone is truly being serious, or if they’re just ‘putting it out there’. You’d challenge something they said, and they go, “You don’t think I’m a racist, do you?”

They tell you that it’s just words, you must not take it to heart. This is what freedom of speech is all about, isn’t it? People have a right to their opinions, however stupid they may be, however frequent they are repeated in the media.

Yet, we forget how powerful words are. Words are not just sounds our mouths make, they also express our beliefs, inclinations, desires, wants and hopes.

In actual fact, we all may be guilty of it when we think of others as people who are less than what we are. We are the educated, and they’re the ignorant. We make decisions rationally, while they hang on to superstitions. We know how to behave responsibly, they need to be guided.

It is just part and parcel of how we view ourselves, and our inclination to think favourably of our self and people like us. This bias begins as an annoyance, but grows toxic when ‘they’ start to be viewed as a problem. It’s ‘their’ idiocy, sloth, avarice, barbarity, recklessness that needs to be fixed, with solutions that those of us, enlightened, will provide.

Today on the internet, anyone (and of late, anything) can post whatever they want which billions can read across the world. Critical analyses of any thought, speech, notion. Ideas of any stripe can be published and read, a democratisation of speech that far outstrips anything that came before it. Yet the internet has also been found to form echo chambers where people only come across views that they agree with.

Part of the reason for that is that we all live and engage with ideas within our own comfortable silos, fortified by the social algorithms that try to keep us addicted to our screens. Our view of the world becomes a severely bounded one, despite the hours we spend reading articles and listicles that come our way. We find that we have more in common with someone who lives in a city across the world, but we do not even know how the person who’s sitting next to us on the bus thinks.

Changing people’s attitudes and mind-sets requires more than just cogent arguments and a clear writing style. We are unlikely to convince people who believe differently from us through our articles and posts. Beliefs are not ladders that you can simply climb up or down from, but a part of an individual that has been shaped and moulded throughout one’s lifetime. A person’s experiences and background cannot be simply supplanted by a brilliant article, nor an inspiring book. It might take years, or it might be never.

As tempting as it may be to be pessimistic about this situation, we really cannot afford to, because this allows hate to fester, as it slowly unravels the patchwork of our colourful societies.

Maybe diversity has lost some of its appeal in this precarious economic age, but we ought to remember the fruits that it’s given us that we’ve come to take for granted. Not just the resultant cultural kaleidoscope of food, music, and arts, but also the perspectives and ideas that have allowed us to think and develop society in innovative new ways.

Attempt to erase diversity in the name of social cohesion would not only be tragic, it would also be a fool’s errand. There is not a single society that is perfectly cohesive; human beings, even among those who are more than a little alike, would still find the points of difference between them. – May 8, 2017.

* Lutfi is a fan of podcasts, cinema, dry history books, and technology (not neccessarily in that order). Currently studying for a Masters in political communication in Sheffield, he is an associate of IMAN Research.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.